"To absent friends, lost loves, old gods, and the season of mists; and may each and every one of us always give the Devil his due."

Sunday, February 22, 2004

It's hard to write. And mostly when it's hard to write I simply rant, which while being simpler, is never as interesting, nor can be used to maintain a torrent of words and ideas. After all, how much can one person complain?

So it comes to this then, an unsteady ramble, almost forced, with no clear direction. No story to tell or idea to dissect.

After a quick trip to the library, I returned with large stack of graphic novels, including Alan Moore's classic Watchmen, and his recently-converted-into-a-movie-which-got-mixed-reviews From Hell. I've read Watchmen before, but it's a compelling read. (For those who don't know much about Alan Moore, he's a British writer who's recently announced his retirement from comic books, and who's written stuff like Swamp Thing, a compelling horror comic about a man who's killed in a swamp, only to wake up as a muck-encrusted monstrosity, and after finally coming to terms with his loss of humanity, finds out that he's not the man who died, but rather just a bunch of plants who have evolved into him, and gained his memories. Mr. Moore's other famous works include, the aforementioned Watchmen, probably the first and certainly one of the most disturbing studies in super-hero deconstructionism, examining how a world would be, if it really had men who could fly and masked vigilantes meting out rough justice, and the recently-also-converted-into-a-movie-but-the-movie-sucked The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.) I skimmed through Watchmen, and couldn't find the patience to read From Hell. I suppose something must be wrong if I'm getting impatient with mere comic books.

Here I shall segue to what seems to be the problem with my mind lately. I seem to be on a short fuse of sorts. Not in terms of temper but rather in terms of attention. I seem to be suffering from a sudden bout of attention deficit disorder, wherein I can't stick to a train of thought long enough to follow it to its logical conclusion. Rather, I simply wander all over. And I suppose having easy access to the internet simply aggravates this problem.

Most of my time these days seems to be spent at sites like Slashdot, or Ananova, reading about the next nerdy (or quirky) news item. I should probably just bite the bullet, and install a RDF aggregator. Then again, that's probably courting further loss in productivity. I can't believe I'm saying this so early in my career, but I seem to be suffering from work addiction, and these are just the withdrawal symptoms.

I shall end with more recommendations from off my reading list (most from my former reading list):

1. Supreme Power: Another superhero deconstructionist tale, only this one is still going on, and new issues come out every month. It's by J. Michael Straczynski, for whom comics are a second job, his first one being a writer/producer of television and film. A preview of Supreme power #1: http://www.wizarduniverse.com/magazines/wizard/WZ20030815-sp_1.cfm

2. Preacher: A weird, violent, and iconoclastic tale about a Texas preacher who loses his faith and gets to play host to an entity as powerful as God, his ex-girlfriend who's now a hitman, and his new best friend, an Irish vampire. After he finds out that the Devil is dead, and God has abandoned Heaven, the preacher goes out to find and confront God and make Him pay for His actions.

3. Ghost World: This has nothing to do with ghosts. It's an immensely funny story about a pair of teenage girls, who decide to wreak havoc with the lives of people around them by playing practical jokes. This became an excellent movie starring Thora Birch.